


Coping Mechanisms for the Recently (Re)Animated

by mieczyhale



Series: Klaus Whump Hour [2]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Child Abuse, Eventual Drug Use, Gen, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, M/M, Self-Harm, Temporary Character Death, Trauma, Underage Drinking, ghosts-a-plenty, i had canonical character death as a tag but that's just ben, really just your usual klaus tags, the mausoleum
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-11
Updated: 2020-06-11
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:15:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23598961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mieczyhale/pseuds/mieczyhale
Summary: He exists as a person for eight years before it starts
Relationships: Dave/Klaus Hargreeves, The Hargreeves Family
Series: Klaus Whump Hour [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1610068
Comments: 6
Kudos: 68





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> hello and welcome to another round of 'a beautiful anon asked me for my thoughts and instead of giving a simple answer i decided to turn it into a SituationTM'. i apologize for the length - future chapters should be longer, i just really wanted to get /something/ out
> 
> the ask:: "hi mace tw self-harm don't know if you're down for this, totally cool to delete and move on if you're not, but was wondering if you have any thoughts about Klaus self-harming in various ways either as a kid or older. i just like,, i feel like he never talks to his family about hard shit so them seeing marks and stuff would actually tell them something's wrong. and i can imagine dave would see marks and be concerned and klaus would be so surprised bc people usually arent yk"
> 
> thanks (as always) to sara, my peanut. my almond joy, for reading this over and giving me feedback <3

It would have started when Klaus was pretty young

The self harm, the self destruction

With no shortage of things to push him down the rabbit hole and keep him there for the next 22 years  
  
\- - - - - -  
  
He exists as a person for eight years before it starts  
  
\- - - - - -  
  
Every night is a nightmare, every day feels like being stuck in a nightmare. The ghosts with their mauled forms and blood that drips but never hits the floor surround him at every opportunity - screaming, crying, getting in his face as they beg for help - cursing him as they try to grab him when they realize he can do nothing for them. But he’s just a kid. He doesn’t really understand what they want, why they’re so angry with him, so their actions are the beginning of Klaus retreating. No longer wanting to try because trying, training, only ever makes them worse. Like they can see his potential so they cling with jagged claws to whatever it is about him that draws in the dead. He tried to explain to Reginald why he doesn’t want to train anymore, tries to get his dad to let him stop - or at least train less - because no one would let their child be scared.. right?, but it goes as well as we all expect. Which is not at all. Reginald calls him a child in a way that makes it sound like an insult, as if he’s been an adult all along and didn’t know, tells him to _suck it up. To stop being weak. The training is necessary. They **all** have to do it._ Klaus makes the mistake of trying to continue the conversation when to Reggie it was clearly done - his word is law after all - so a quick decision is made. It was a little earlier than he had planned but well.. he was going to get there eventually anyway..  
  
That evening is the first time Klaus gets thrown into the mausoleum. He scrambled to his feet as he heard the door lock and he rushed at it - hitting the concrete door with his hands. He thinks he might be screaming but he can’t tell - the people around him are louder.  
  
Time passes slowly, every moment horrifying - the ghosts are angrier than normal and there’s more of them. They say such awful things, scream things that are worse - things he doesn’t understand. They fill the mausoleum and crowd around him, keep him trapped in a back corner, laugh as he covers his ears - pulls at his hair - begs them to stop. When the tears start they mock him - he’s alive, what does he have to cry about? He bites his lip to try and stop himself from crying any harder, from giving them a reason to taunt him worse, even though it’s all he wants to do, and even though it _doesn’t_ work he keeps biting. He isn’t aware of too much after that besides a pulsing headache, a vague change of.. something in him and the blood he wipes away from his lip.  
  
Reginald doesn’t come back for him for an entire day.  
  
Klaus can’t make eye contact with him anymore.  
  
\- - - -  
  
He does a mix of living and surviving for almost five years after that.   
  
Living - because things aren’t that bad yet, not really. Sure the dead still surround him. Sure he finds himself locked away in the frozen dark of the mausoleum most days.. nights.. both?? It all runs together when you can’t see even a sliver of the outside world and there’s no clock. When the only proof that any time has passed at all is the growing hunger. The near painful thirst. The amount of blood he’s scratched, clawed, torn from himself - drying to his skin, his clothes, his fingernails. The way his head no longer hurts when he slams it back into the wall ( _is there blood on the wall? he almost wants to turn and find out, touch it and see, but that means putting his back to the packed nightmare that have made it very clear they hate him - want him; dead. broken. naked. slaughtered. he might want the universe to show him a little mercy but at the hands of the damned? never. he’d rather kill himself. foreshadowing? we all know the answer is ‘yes’_ ) so there’s no real concept of time. But Reginald always lets him out eventually - be it hours or days later, depending on whether he was thrown in for training or punishment, there’s _always_ an end. And yeah over the years more and more of the ghosts attach to him - follow him - each trip to the mausoleum adds to the gory sights and the cacophony of screams, cries, threats - but at least he’s “free”. He’s out of that place.  
  
Being harassed by the dead while trapped in a tomb and being harassed by ghosts while curled up in his bed or trying to hang out with his siblings are truly two different experiences.  
  
So.. it’s living. Because it’s tolerable.  
  
Until it’s not.  
  
You’d think growing up seeing and hearing the dead, being locked away and starved, having an abusive piece of shit for a father, and watching your siblings come to hate you - irritated by every word out of your mouth and probably your mere presence - would have caused the tipping point. And caused it a lot sooner. But the switch from living to surviving, the drop further down the rabbit hole, has its own unique cause.  
  
You’d never expect a staircase.  
  
He certainly hadn’t.   
  
But laying at the bottom of the stairs, holding his broken jaw and looking up at where he had been moments earlier, he feels like maybe he should have.  
  
It might be the tears distorting his vision but he thinks Reginald smiles. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He does what he does best: talks without saying anything. He doesn’t want to talk about the mausoleum. He doesn't want to talk about the staircase. He doesn’t want to hear the jokes he knows his siblings have probably been holding on to since the moment he hit the final step. He doesn’t want to say real things anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note that tags have changed - a lot has been removed. As I worked on this chapter I realized it (meaning: the whole fic) was probably not going to go the way I originally planned. Which I'm pretty annoyed with myself about but I do not control the Me apparently so /shrug. Please enjoy the trash I bring you.
> 
> p.s: linear timeline whomst??
> 
> p.p.s: i was drunk while writing most of this so.. whoops

Klaus thinks having his jaw wired shut for eight weeks should probably make him miserable.. but it doesn’t, not really.  
  
Truthfully?? It goes in the other direction. It’s definitely not fun in some ways - like how he can’t eat real food and he can’t talk - but for the most part he finds himself almost.. happy. Or maybe not happy but something. Something better. Because for the first time in his life - for the first time in 4,748 days. In 156 months. In 678 weeks. In 410,227,200 goddamn seconds - he gets to experience something he’s wanted, wished for, but never dared to hope he’d have: _silence_. Complete. And utter. Silence. There isn’t a single voice outside of his internal monologue and the ones he’s never minded - the voices of his siblings. Of grace as she gives him the pain killers for his jaw. Of Pogo trying to get a group of near-thirteen year olds to learn about the Vietnam war. He doesn’t like Reginald’s voice - never has - and he wishes he could make him disappear with the ghosts, especially after the “accident” ( _because that’s what Reginald told everyone it was. stupid number four traipsing around in Grace’s heels like a child. on top of the fact that those shoes weren’t meant for boys anyway, he clearly didn’t know what he was doing. couldn’t figure out simple balance. but that wasn’t a surprise. useless, useless, disappointment, that Number Four_ ) but Klaus has to admit, for the moment at least, that between the wailing of the damned and the insults of Sir Reginald Hargreeves.. he kind of preferred the later.  
  
It takes him a bit to figure out why things are suddenly so quiet, why his vision is no longer filled blood and guts (a _nd missing faces, partially torn off limbs, burns, empty eye sockets, knives and axes and saws sticking out of a number of places. ghosts who only have a piece of themselves. ghosts who don’t even have that_ ). Maybe he should have realized it sooner but he gives himself a pass because he _did_ recently slam his head into the ground and he _was_ on morphine for awhile and he _was_ in a very soft world for some time. But now that he’s on some other painkiller - effective but not quite as intense - drawing closer to the end of the eight weeks - it dawns on him.  
  
It’s one random afternoon, when there’s nothing going on so he’s curled up in his room alone with a book of German poetry ( _a sneaky gift from Ben, slipped to him a year or so ago. his brother might be just down the hall but he misses him and the little book has come to be a sort of comfort item. a treasure he hides under a loose floorboard in his bedroom with the few other items that make him happy_ ) Klaus isn’t sure what makes him think about it right then. It could be the silence he was enjoying but definitely not used to, or the click of Grace’s heels ( _the familiar sound of the woman who had been giving him the pain medicine that now sat on his night stand_ ) as she passed his door at the exact moment he looked up from his book - where his eyes landed on the pill bottle sitting on his nightstand. Maybe it was everything - maybe it was nothing ( _with a fuzzy brain he finds it doesn’t really matter. a familiar theme that follows him all his life: nothing matters_ ) Whatever it was: that moment - those few seconds - changed.. everything.  
  
The next step really isn’t a hard one to make. Yeah taking more painkillers than necessary probably wasn’t smart BUT if they did what he was thinking they did?? Nothing else mattered. Getting to have silence.. not hearing screams and cries and threats every second of the day.. not having to see the gore that came with the violent and angry ghosts that tended to stick to him like frozen parasites.. it sounded like a dream honestly. And if he couldn’t hear the dead, couldn’t see the dead… would Reginald still lock him away? Would he continue to spend his _oh so precious_ time dragging Klaus to the car, making the drive, walking the fine line between having a child who was dead and one who was almost dead like the distinguished professional he was?? Klaus didn’t allow himself to think about it anymore as he grabbed the little orange bottle and examined the label, squinting at it more out of fuzzy-brained confusion and an attempt to focus than anything else.  
  
Klaus is thirteen years old when he learns, with 100% certainty, that drugs make the ghosts go away.  
  
He had ways of coping before this day, this moment - not that they were very successful but they at least kept him from finding one of Reggie’s guns. From taking two steps to the left while bullets were flying during a mission. From letting Luther attack him during group training without defending himself ( _well… every time anyway. even after he starts excitedly exploring the world of drugs he finds that he doesn’t really mind getting roughed up during training with his siblings. not for any inappropriate reason, god no, but maybe because its what he deserves. it’s what they have hinted he deserves. what Reginald has outright said he deserves - he’s weak after-all and well.. there’s no way to get stronger than to let your siblings beat the shit out of you right?? and the stabbing - that’s got its own merits. none of which have anything to do with the fact that when he hits the floor after a punch from Luther he feels a little more focused, possible head injuries aside. Luther wasn’t supposed to use his super strength all-out but that never stopped him. Klaus couldn’t blame him - if he had a simple, straight forward power like Luther he’d probably want to use it whenever possible too - show off whenever possible. make their dad proud even though it would never last for longer than that single moment you’ve done what he wanted - hurt whoever he’s deemed an enemy. there just might be a reason that Reginald has never called Luther out for using his powers against Klaus but makes sure to call out his Number One if anyone else gets more roughed up than he wanted_ )  
  
It’s also definitely got nothing to do with the fact that every cut from Diego’s knives seems to provide him a moment of breath - a moment of _life_. ( _two things he finds himself lacking more and more as the years pass, as the trips to the mausoleum last longer, and as what little mask of false sympathy Reginald had towards him completely disappears. while his siblings get more and more sick of him-_ )  
  
Klaus discovers the power of drugs at thirteen years old  
  
Klaus discovers the real world at thirteen years old  
  
He discovers silence - relatively short periods of it but he’ll take it over the screaming that never ends.  
  
He discovers what contentment apparently is, what it feels like ( _not that he has anyone to talk to about it or any frame of reference but… has he ever been content? for just a day in his miserable life?? for just an hour?? a moment?? what he feels is so new that Klaus can’t come up with another name for it. not that it matters. if he’s wrong inside his own head whose going to know?? Ii doesn’t matter_ )  
  
Not too long after this relief, this revelation, the pills regulated by Grace have served their purpose and she takes them away.  
  
His jaw is unwired. He’s fine. He can talk.  
  
And he does, of course.

But not really.  
  
He does what he does best: talks without saying anything. He doesn’t want to talk about the mausoleum. He doesn't want to talk about the staircase. He doesn’t want to hear the jokes he knows his siblings have probably been holding on to since the moment he hit the final step. He doesn’t want to say real things anymore.  
  
Klaus is eight years old when he discovers the damage fingernails can do.  
  
He’s almost nine when he discovers alcohol, the ways the small amounts he can sneak help.  
  
He’s ten when Reginald seems to know what he’s doing, what he’s trying to do, and the alcohol is locked away more thoroughly ( _Klaus won’t learn how to break into the cabinet without having to straight up break the glass for a few months yet, you see. the thought won’t occur to him - not because he’s stupid but because when Reginald makes a decision you have three choices: obey, obey, or be punished. and Klaus has found himself in the ‘punished’ category even when he’s done nothing_ ) When Reginald finally decides he should maybe intervene with the fucking ten year old taking shots of vodka and whiskey, the way he lectures Klaus isn’t really that different from how he talks to his Number Four usually, but there’s still something in that moment that makes Klaus very sure that if he steps out of line in this regard again there are going to be consequences. Cold. Dark. Horrifyingly haunted consequences. And from the way he overheard Reginald and Pogo talking about it he just might find his time locked away to last far _far_ longer than it already does. And maybe that path is inevitable - knowing Klaus’s luck so far it will be - but that doesn’t mean he needs to help it come faster. So he gives the appropriate and expected responses, promises to never touch alcohol again.  
  
The following weeks run together. with no pills and no alcohol his life returns to normal - his horrid, nightmare inducing version of normal - and it’s almost like the ghosts can sense that he’s once again 100% aware, his escape taken from him, because they’re… worse. He doesn’t know how that’s possible - if blocking them out for months after his fall gave them time to gather their seemingly endless violent energy or if they’re just extra pissed because they had no one to scream at - but like most things it’s not important. The reason, the cause, is not important. All that matters is that they are _louder._ Angrier. And he can only do so much to combat that. And that ‘so much’ isn’t much at all. He doesn’t know how to tune them out, or shut them up, or make them go away. He doesn’t know how to anything with his powers.  
  
He doesn’t know how to do anything at all.  
  
He runs with his siblings, fights with them when told to ( _when the opportunity arises. though it’s not always during group training. turns out its very easy to infuriate both Luther and Diego. to no one’s surprise_ ). He eats the food Grace makes for them ( _happily. if he ever complains about something she’s made then he’s been replaced by a double_ ) and despite a popular growing belief he _does_ try his best when his siblings need him. Not that they ever really need him but he _is_ the lookout on missions. So they need him a little right? … Maybe? He’s not going to let himself focus on that. Whatever they may feel about him ( _annoyance, irritation, anger, frustration, disappointment-_ ) they’re his family.  
  
However… between the dead surrounding the criminals and each of his brothers plus sister ( _because they’ve killed people. they’re killers. they're exactly what Reginald wanted them to be_ ) and his inability to truly focus 100% for more than a few minutes, playing lookout isn’t exactly easy. He doesn’t dare say that to anyone, too paranoid of it getting back to Reginald ( _as everything does. Klaus doesn’t quite know all the ways yet, the ‘why’s or anything, but he knows he’s different from his other siblings. specifically from his other brothers. and he’s just waiting for Reginald to address those faults too. because he will. of course he will_ ) Reginald, who would probably have some thoughts on how to fix him further.  
  
 _Fix._  
  
Because he’s done such a good job of fixing Klaus so far of course ( _sometimes there’s ghosts who’ll say they feel bad for him, say they are disgusted by Reginald’s actions, but Klaus knows they’re pretending. probably to get him to interact with them. because nobody should feel bad for him. there’s no reason. he deserves what he gets, it’s for his powers. for his fear. for his disobedience. it’s whats best for.. him?? for the team? for the team. for something more important than himself. everything is more important than himself. everything. everyone. sometimes there are bugs trapped in the mausoleum with him and Klaus doesn’t have to wonder where they are on the scale of things that matter in this world. it’s miles above him_ ) However, as difficult as his position within the team can be... he can admit it’s better than being in on the action. The last thing he needs is a ghost stuck to him that has a good personal reason to hate him.  
  
But of course it only takes a few years, across a few alleyways, after he finds a way into Reginald’s liquor cabinet ( _after he crawls out his bedroom for the first time out of sheer desperation for silence_ ) for him to create the beginnings of his personal ghost entourage.  
  
He didn’t even need the academy  
  
He could murder just fine all on his own, thank you very much, Reginald  
  
He laughs only because he’s too high to cry  
  
And at 16 years old he can do nothing but _continue_ laughing - void of any humor - as a vision of completely decimated remains start following him too

_Ben_


End file.
